OUR OPINION: Zohydro is only part of the drug addiction problem

Thursday

Apr 17, 2014 at 4:19 AMApr 17, 2014 at 4:24 AM

Clearly no one is doing much of anything to safeguard the public against the overprescribing of opioid pain relievers.

Though we understand the legal constraints U.S. District Court Judge Rya Zobel was operating under when she lifted Gov. Deval Patrick’s statewide ban of the powerful new opioid drug Zohydro, we are disappointed.

Patrick issued the ban last month in an attempt to force San Diego-based drugmaker Zogenix to produce a tamper-resistant pill of the highly addictive pain reliever, but the company took the state to court instead, where Zobel, in her ruling, wrote that the federal approval by the Food and Drug Administration superceded the state ban. What a shame.

The goal of abuse-resistant technology is to prevent addicts from crushing and then snorting or injecting the pill. Considering the epidemic of drug addiction, overdoses and deaths, frequently caused by prescription painkillers, it is highly irresponsible to market a drug without it. Zogenix and the FDA should have held themselves to higher standards and made Zohydro safer to use. But when billions are at stake – OxyContin had annual sales of $1.1 billion just four years after it was introduced in 1996 – it’s clear that money is more important than people.

But the tussle between Patrick and the maker of Zohydro may have been for naught. Last month, Purdue Pharma announced that it will soon submit a tamper-resistant version of pure hydrocodone to the FDA for its approval. Purdue is best known for manufacturing OxyContin. Doctors are far more likely to prescribe it than the already-notorious Zohydro, if only to avoid the hassle.

Certainly there are many complicating factors involved in this issue. We understand that Zohydro is an attractive alternative to other opioid pain relievers because it’s pure hydrocodone and doesn’t contain ibuprofen (think Advil) or acetaminophen (think Tylenol), which aren’t tolerated by some patients, especially those with liver disease. And we don’t want anyone to suffer.

Yet the explosion of overdose deaths is directly related to prescription painkillers. According to a 2013 United Nations report, 70,000-100,000 people die worldwide every year from opioid overdoses. Those are conservative numbers because no one is actually collecting such data, not even in Massachusetts.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that drug overdose was the leading cause of injury death in the U.S. in 2010. That same year, the CDC reports, “enough opioid pain relievers (OPR) were sold to medicate every adult in the United States with the equivalent of a typical dose of 5 mg of hydrocodone every four hours for one month, a 300 percent increase in the sales rate over 11 years.”

Clearly no one is doing much of anything to safeguard the public against the overprescribing of these drugs. Quincy state Sen. John Keenan’s effort to require doctors to register with the state prescription monitoring program is a fantastic start, but not nearly enough.

And as much as we appreciate and support the governor’s efforts to keep the people of Massachusetts safe from yet another opioid, this one without any sort of tamper resistance, we can’t help but note that no technology can prevent an addict from swallowing a pill in the first place.

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